Red to Black
by A Gaggle of Geese
Summary: Ino is used to danger, but as the world collapses into chaos, she isn't ready for what that truly means. When a murdering virus breaks out, people are turned into walking zombies, and her parents disappear, Ino is determined to get them both back and bring them to safety. But danger follows at her heels, in the form of the living and the dead - will she ever be safe again? AU!
1. Chapter 1

**Red to Black**

 _Growing up in a home full of mind-readers and trained killers, Ino is used to a bit of danger. But when a murdering virus breaks out and she wakes up in a world that collapses into chaos and disarray, while people are turned into walking zombies, she isn't quite ready for what it means._

 _When her parents disappear, and she is left at home, with dwindling supplies, with threats from the outside and within, Ino is determined to get them both back and bring them to safety. But danger follows at her heels, in the form of the living and the dead – will she ever be safe again?_

* * *

The library held the smell of buttercups, old paper and golden dust that had gathered upon the mahogany shelves and the leather bound cases of the books that stood on top of them.

Ino wasn't allowed here, in the Before. It had fallen determinedly under the "Out of Bounds" label, just as she wasn't allowed in the Office, and the Flower Garden, a high, wild structure made of metal and glass, which stood at the back of the garden, nearing the edge of the woods. There were seals written on the glass, in bright ink, and they flared up in various shades of blue, green and red with surprising intensity, lighting up like colored candles against a flickering, transparent background.

There was no one to keep her out now. She had broken into the Office the day before, but it hadn't been as terribly exciting and exhilarating as she'd hoped. The Office consisted of a dark, mahogany room, with a large desk in the middle. There were some unopened scrolls, some _opened_ scrolls, and golden fish that floated in ceramic tubes, all belly up and flat-eyed. She supposed the oxygen pomp had stopped working some days before. Perhaps even before **EVERYTHING WENT WRONG**.

"Asphyxiation seems to me a horrible way to die," Ino had said, when she took the fish out of the tubes and studied them in her hands. They had gleamed mockingly in response, glittering scales all golden and yellow. She had given them a proper burial by the back door, and even said a few words, but nobody responded. The house was completely silent and vacant, gathering dust, instead of clean cotton and fresh flower fragrances. Just thinking about it, made Ino feel like crying.

(Once, Dad told Ino about a boy and a talking house. It was a children's story, meant to entertain.

"I don't want to part with you," said the boy, at the end of the story, when he was all grown up and ready to face the outside world.

"Sometimes you must part with the things you love," the talking house said, with a terribly sad smile. "Only then can you grow and become who you were meant to be."

She used to like the story, but the memory seemed cold and distant, after curling up in her room under cold covers, with nobody to kiss her cheek goodnight, with only deafening silence around her. She had tried to escape into her parents' bedroom after that, hopping onto the bed and sniffing into the pillows, to hope and find some missing warmth. Then, she had abandoned that too; she slept solely on the couch in the living room now, facing the door and starting at every sound.

If parting with her parents meant she could grow, then she refused to.

 _She refused to_.)

The library was a wide space, with a carpeted wooden floor and high windows that let in the yellow patch the sun threw down. There were three round tables, with sturdy armchairs that had decorative yellow pillows, which looked comfortable, but were hard and itchy to the touch.

She dropped the Office scrolls on one of the tables and went to one of the windows, placing her hands on the windows sill, which scorched her hands with cold. The garden was vacant, a spreading area of grass, enriched with daisies and buttercups, sprouting up now and then, with on either side of the yard a high wooden fence.

Ino turned around resolutely, and hopped towards the bookshelves, trailing the cases with a finger. The books felt brittle, as if they would disintegrate in the space of a moment, a sudden blink of time when she sneezed or breathed too loudly. There were books about the economics of the Land of Fire, with a picture of the Daimyo in a golden embroidered gown on the front, about sea life in the Land of Waves, a scroll about firejutsu and chakra affinities, which she all discarded without a second glance.

Finally, she found something useful; a scroll about poisonous plants and a book about household etiquette, which included a part about sewing. She dropped them on the table of the Office scrolls.

"I'm going to need those," Ino said, in a much brighter tone than she felt. _If nobody comes for me_ lingered at the back of her throat, a choking weight waiting to be emitted. But speaking the words would make them real – would mean that she was alone and lonely and abandoned, and Ino would much rather disbelieve in reality than accept that as a harsh truth.

" _Stay here, Ino_ ," Mother had said.

All of this searching made her hungry, so she retreated from the library to the kitchen, which she cautiously and with a sinking feeling entered. A large splatter of blood stained the white tiles of the floor, which had clotted and dried out. It resembled red paint more than it did blood. She didn't have the guts to touch and clean it. It stank like decay and rot.

A few days after the day **EVERYTHING WENT WRONG** , the front door had opened.

 _Stay here, Ino._ She had ran towards the hall, angry tears streaking her cheeks, heart hammering in her chest, as if it wanted to escape her ribcage and cultivate bruises on her skin, but it hadn't been her mother who'd entered.

It was the housemaid, Ayano, a civilian woman with a wrinkled face and the kindest heart, but she no longer looked human. Her skin was dry and much too large for her face, hanging around her chin and temples, as if someone had taken skin and plastered it on top of her bones, without knowing the exact measures of her skull. Bits of skin and tissue were missing here and there, exposing the bone underneath.

Ino had seen bones, in class, when Iruka-sensei was covering the human anatomy, but they were bleached white. Ayano's skull was stained and red and pink, and there was a large gash in her chest, and teeth marks on the tanned skin of her arm.

Ino had taken the lamp from the table and smashed her head with it.

She smashed it against the floor and kept going, while everything around her faded. It was as if she was in a dream, and her hand kept going up and down and up and down, to squeeze around that bottlecap neck, while something moist and warm splattered over her clothes in small rivulets. The dream-like state disappeared, when her arms started to tire, and only then did she stop.

After a bewildered, horrified glance, Ino sprung up and vomited all over the floor, red-stained hands pressing against her tailored top. She couldn't bear to look at Ayano, or what was left of her, but then something twitched in the corner of her eye and moved.

 _Dead things don't move_.

Ayano was in the freezer now. Ino had locked the door with three different locks, and put a chair under the handle, which kept rattling. Her clothes she had thrown into the bin, covered under plastic bags and glass bottles, so that she wouldn't retch every unfortunate time her gaze was directed at it.

The handle, which had been still when she entered the kitchen, rattled when she opened one of the cupboards. Ino was determined to ignore it, but her hands were shaking and seemed out of her control, spasming like confused flies trying to find an exit in a glass room. There were a few containers of food left, and half a loaf of bread.

She grabbed the latter and went back to the library, retching and swallowing hard when she passed the splatter of blood. The library felt lush and sweet, full of papery brittleness as she came in; Ino had never liked books as much as she did now, surrounded by shelves and scrolls, as silent as silence could be.

In the Academy, killing had been described as something hard, with everlasting consequences; one must always kill for the mission. For the Village. Ino had been prepared too, to kill and even die, but this was not a mission or a hypothetical situation; this was real and killing had been remarkably easy, which was the scariest part.

She threw the books and the scrolls in one of her bags – a purple one, in the form of a heart, which could be carried on her back, pressing against her spine. It was her favorite one, a birthday present, from her parents, who always knew what she wanted without consulting her.

"Do come back," Ino said to the library, as if her parents were hidden somewhere among the books.

"I'm not a ninja. I won't survive."

* * *

The days were long, but the nights were longer.

Ino spent the majority of her time in the library, where she went through books and scrolls, scanned the shelves, and pocketed the ones, which looked useful. She scavenged her bedroom for any textbooks of the Academy and ran through her usual katas, trying to find routine in the movements. It was more out of a sense of obligation, than any real boredom or desperation that she trained, but she felt more in control after it, as if the katas bettered her in every possible way.

The last booby traps in her parents' bedroom she disabled quickly and cautiously, almost forgetting to avoid an oncoming shiruken. It scraped her chin, only missing her mouth by an inch, and left a long red line that ran upwards towards her lips.

She dabbed it half-heartedly with a finger, which came away red.

 _I am a ninja_ , Ino told herself, though it sounded unconvincing, even in her head. The sight of the red blood on her fingers made her squeamish and nauseous, so she sat down on the carpeted floor and stared at the creme-colored individual fabric strands that sprung up between her bare toes. They made her think of grass slants, and she realized, after a moment of silent staring, that she hadn't been outside for more than a week now.

There was a fallen picture on the ground. It was right there, in front of her nose, half-hidden under the desk, half obstructed from her view by the mahogany armchair and the wooden desk.

Ino snatched it away and peered closely. The glass was broken, but the picture inside was undamaged; her mother looked like a picture carved from marble, pale and hard-eyed, with an expression that seemed painted and that said _I will always persevere_. Her smile was a pretty, wide thing – a row of coral teeth. Dad had his arm slung around her bare shoulders, and he was dappled in a red cloak, with a freshly cleaned headband strung around his neck. They looked happy and peaceful, and something about their smiles made Ino's throat tighten.

She ate late, with the picture stuffed among the books in her heart-shaped bag, and ate and ate, until she could no more. She hadn't eaten since yesterday morning; a few rice balls and a piece of dango, serving as breakfast. The rations were steadily dwindling, but Ino knew she would last another week, or more.

The back door was locked, but she undid it quickly, before she lost her courage, hands scraping on the metal. Soon she was leafing down the path, swimming in sweat. The sun bore down on her scalp; a hot, unpleasant burn on her skin.

Her blood stopped moving, when something in the bushes rustled. Her heart in her throat, Ino stared ahead, eyes flicking from side to side, body shifting into a kata, with a sharpened kunai in her hand. If it was another _dead thing_ _moving_ like Ayano...

The bushes rustled again and then a crow took the air, wings flapping strongly. She eyed it until it became a dark spot against the sky in the distance, and only then continued on her way.

 _Stay here, Ino_.

That was all good and well advice, Ino supposed, but she could not keep being cooped up in the house forever. She hadn't heard from anyone, not even Iruka-sensei or the Hokage, the leader of Konoha; authority figures. Surely someone had to know what was going on.

The wireless radio wasn't working. She had tried to dial time upon time, waiting in the Office, with her heart skipping a beat, whenever she imagined the static getting weaker. Yet, there was no one on the other side of the line, and no matter how many times she said "My name is Ino Yamanaka. I am a student of the Academy. Please, respond. I need help.", the static remained. She continued to rattle off the ninja registration numbers of her parents, with a faint hope that someone would answer.

Nobody did.

The Flower Garden towered over her. She put her hand against the glass, and the seals flared up in brilliant colors. They formed a painting of crimson red and the blue of the sky, and the brilliant green of the forest moss that covered the pebble stones by the entrance.

On the windows sat insects, even on the inside of the glass, stuck to the forming mildew around the edges of the window panes. They shone up like oil lanterns in the sun. It reminded her of Shino Aburame, a lean classmate who quietly roamed and occasionally looked up in class to emit something stifling and unnecessarily polite. She had seen him using his bugs only once, during a vicious spar between him and Sasuke Uchiha.

Ino had labeled him as "creepy bug boy" after that. The other girls had laughed, gloating about something for which they themselves did not have to suffer.

Yet it was a kind of bullying. At the time it had been hilarious; that strange boy, with his dark sunglasses, behind which you could still see fiery, light eyes glitter, and with a collar so high that even the tip of his nose was barely visible. Nobody had spoken up or chastised her about it, when Ino described him as such, not even sweet Sakura, who herself had enough experience with such practices.

Ino had never really thought of Shino, but she did now and felt guilty. She hoped he was safe. And happy. That was really all she could do for him.

Her hair lit up golden under the sun, tickling her neck. She tried to open the door, pressing against it with her whole body, but it would not budge.

"Come on," Ino said, softly enough that it could easily be mistaken for a whisper. " _Please_."

There were flowers behind the glass, angling upwards to the glass ceiling. Their stems were littered with small hairs, pus bursting from small ruptures. The plants were dying, Ino realized. She peered at the Flower Garden, startled with the realization that she was missing something that was right in front of her eyes.

There were coiling steel pipes running over the floor and the window panes. Some were dyed a shade of dark green, and resembled stems. Others were transparent; there was a cerulean substance within, more a gas than a liquid, and at once, she knew what it was: _chakra_.

The chakra pipes were not buzzing, nor was the substance within moving. She supposed the whole system for generating the lives of plants and flowers had shut down, when **EVERYTHING WENT WRONG**.

She walked around the glass chamber to the other side of the Flower Garden, where she spotted a whithered, yellowed bush clover plant. It was dying, without the necessary chakra, water and nutrients.

Ino lay a hand on the warm glass, as if she was trying to reach through it. She wondered if she could direct her own chakra through the glass, to bring the plant back to life. Then she shook her head; it seemed a silly thing, saving a plant when both of her parents were missing. Or dead.

As soon as that treacherous sound went through her head, a scream came from the other side of the house, by the street. It sounded distant and far away, but so full of agony that Ino promptly forgot all her lessons and forgot to move. _So this is what death sounds like_ , she thought.

The scream awakened something in her chest, something cold and growling, and then it was abruptly cut short. Ino hadn't removed her hand from the heated glass; it scorched her hand with warmth.

In her thoughts she saw herself moving, she crossed the rose bushes, sinking her feet into the moist spongy ground, stepped over the flower buds at the door - " _Do not step on them, Ino. You'll ruin them. In our lives we must keep our destructive tendencies to a minimum. We already break enough._ " - until she was at the door and took the handle in her heated hands, and then stepped into the hall where she breathed in the cool air, full of scent of safety and something warmth, like dough and gingerbread, that washed away the air of the outside, which smelled like grass and mud, as it should.

Then she was really moving, hopping and tumbling away as fast as she could get those damned legs of her to move, stepping onto the flowers as she approached the house. She locked the door behind her and escaped towards the living room, where she hid under the covers, with only her head peeking out.

Everywhere she looked, she swore she could see Ayano's face moving in the shadows, but some cold, rational part of her brain reassured her that her housemaid was securely shut into the freezer. It did nothing to ease her distress.

It was a long time, until her eyelids grew too heavy for even her fear, and she succumbed to sleep, which was plagued with nightmares.

Ayano featured in her dreams; a dark presence at the edge of her consciousness. She saw red blood, staining tiles like paint splatter on the insides of her eyelids, and in Ayano's flat, glazed-over eyes, grew withering bush clovers, the petals turning a yellow that resembled Ino's own hair, until they burst aflame; alight with a startling fire that Ino had read so much about in all her schoolbooks.

"The Will of Fire," the Hokage had said on the first day of the Academy, when Ino's hair was still freshly cut short, before **EVERYTHING WENT WRONG**. It seemed so long ago, as if she had aged years in the small time span of the few weeks that she was alone. "That is what drives us. There's a fire in our heart, and a will in our brain – together we will do the impossible."

Afterwards, when she woke up, coiled in her sheets, swimming in her own sweat, she couldn't say whether the moving dead thing in the freezer had featured more in her nightmares, or the dying flowers from the Flower Garden.

She didn't dream about her parents. For the first time, they were the trees behind the fog and she happened to be the ever-ending road.

* * *

The chamber was ghost-quiet, when she awoke, only disrupted by the crackle of voices that drifted through the air from the Office.

"...Konoha's military..."

Ino lay very still, hands spasming at her sides. The crispness of the early morning dark penetrated the fabric of her pajamas, and even her skin, sinking deep into her bones underneath to settle within.

She swung her legs over her bed, smacking them on the cold floor. The voices from the Office were barely audible above the wind that howled around the house, the word intelligible, but the speed with which she thundered through the entrance to the Office was sure to break her speed record at the Academy. The wireless radio on the desk crackled again.

"...ask everyone to remain calm and civilized. The Shinobi Village Sunagakure had granted Konoha's civilians and shinobi refuge. We have taken up camp just outside of its gates. We ask every living, remaining citizen of Konoha to return to us safely."

There was salty fluid gathering in Ino's burning eyes. _Sunagakure_. Dad had gone to that Village multiple times, and she remembered its splendor from his tales; the unending, flat meadows of waste and sand, giving way to splendid gates and tall towers, with long rows of silken pennants swaying in the breeze, the gleam of steel and sweat inside. The streets, Dad had told her, were full of people in long robes, tall and broad, small and slender, and the days had rung with hundreds of voices and the pounding hooves of cattle.

"Is it better than Konoha?" she had asked, eyes lamp-like. She had never seen such a Village.

At that, her father's smile had sobered, and withered on his face. He looked at her, with a gaze that laid her heart bare, and had said: "No. It is not better than Konoha. It is boisterous, yes, and raucous, but Konoha is organized and protects its own. In Sunagakure, it's every man for himself."

"Sensei says that that's what makes us so great," Ino said, in return. "We value every ninja."

"He would be right in saying that," Dad had said. "Every person is important in Konoha. Together we form a good front. Be loyal, Ino. It is Konoha that you owe your life to."

Now, it didn't feel as if Ino's Village was build upon _togetherness_ and social cohesion. She hadn't eaten since yesterday, all the cupboards were slowly starting to empty, and no one had come for her. _Stay here, Ino_. Easy to say, when you were leaving.

The wireless radio crackled with static. She stared at it, hands balled, gaze roaming over the hard, plastic band, to the metal receiver. It buzzed again, red lights flickering mockingly.

She dialed the radio. The static was loud and overbearing. "Ino Yamanaka, here. Mother, Dad, if you're listening – _please_ – I'm coming for you. I'm sick of seeing your faces in lifeless pictures. I'm sick of being alone."

She paused to take a stuttering breath. Her face was crusted with tears, but she couldn't feel the burning in her eyes, behind the ache in her chest.

"You told me to stay here, Mother. And I did. I stayed, but you didn't come back. I don't get how someone can be here and then they're not. But I'm coming – I'm going to save you and Dad. Wherever you are. I promise."

Thunder rolled outside and a flash of lightning illuminated the room in cold, white light. Rain splattered against the window panes, where her reflection, with a crest of unkempt hair, stared back at her.

"I'm coming."

* * *

A/N

Thank you for reading. This is less of a first chapter, and more of a prologue, but it felt wrong to label it that way, since there are definitely events in this part that will play a big part in the future. Let me know if you've spotted any typos, or mistakes, and whether you felt Ino was too OOC. I tried to make her realistic; a scared girl, who has not even graduated from the Academy, in a world that has gone to hell, all alone, without a family.


	2. Chapter 2

**Red to Black**

 **II**

 _Growing up in a home full of mind-readers and trained killers, Ino is used to a bit of danger. But when a murdering virus breaks out and she wakes up in a world that collapses into chaos and disarray, while people are turned into walking zombies, she isn't quite ready for what it means._

 _When her parents disappear, and she is left at home, with dwindling supplies, with threats from the outside and within, Ino is determined to get them both back and bring them to safety. But danger follows at her heels, in the form of the living and the dead – will she ever be safe again?_

* * *

The neck was exposed, nape and all, so Ino gathered her kunai high up in the air and slashed it down.

It sheared the flesh and went through bone. Blood spurted from the wound, splattering against the purple fabric of her top and she felt it become soaked against her skin. The _dead_ _boy_ hollered, a shriek so shrill that Ino winced at the sound of it, and turned his bloody gaze upon her, but she drove another kunai in his body, straight through the eye. Then she bolted.

The heart-shaped rucksack bounced against her spine, just below her shoulders blades. She tried to breath through her nose, like Iruka-sensei had instructed, running on the balls of her feet, quick with nimble movements, as lithe as a cat. She tried to pretend that this was just another training lap, but it didn't change the fact that she was covered in blood and bits of bones and _she just killed someone_.

The third one today. She had encountered three dead things already; the boy, an older woman with striking blue eyes, who muttered under her breath, with her intestines hanging out of her belly, all pink and red and white, and a man in his fourties, who resembled Dad so much that she had looked twice before she slashed his throat.

The streets by her house had been vacant, still in perfect condition, but as she came farther away from it, the houses became run-down, with toppled walls, scorch marks etched deeply in stone, with dead bodies lying in heaps here and there. Dead things roamed the streets like flies, grunting and growling like animals. Ino had not seen any real animals yet, other than crows and ravens, which came down to pick flesh. Their beady black eyes made her shiver.

Everything smelled like rot and decay, and made her think of Ayano, who was still stuck in that freezer, banging against the inside of the door. Cold hadn't seemed to kill her and now she would be stuck in a refrigerator forever, because **EVERYTHING WENT WRONG**.

Ino reached inside her jacket and pulled out her scarf to tie it around her mouth. It made breathing slightly easier, and smothered the feelings of panic blossoming in her stomach. She went to the toppled grocery store at the end of the street – there was a board sticking out from under the rubble, with dirt on top of it, like an earth jutsu gone wrong; Kagura's Grocery Store – and pried her foot between the ivy.

"Chakra is in everything,' Iruka-sensei had begun the first lesson, on the first day of the Academy. "It is created when our physical and mental energy is combined. It runs through our bodies, through our coils. Cherish it."

They had gone off to some chakra exercices after that, such as holding a pencil stable on a pinky, or sticking a leaf to the forehead. That was one thing Sakura excelled at ; the ease with which she directed her chakra, had been bitter to watch. Ino hadn't been able to even feel her chakra that first lesson. Afterwards, she had gone to Dad, and begged him to help. She'd felt proud; a ninja harnessed every resource. Now, it just made her sad.

Quietly, Ino concentrated on the buzzing concentration in her arm and the steady heartbeat in her chest. She felt the chakra boil through her coils, as it was directed towards her arms and feet, and then she tried to stick it to the wall.

* * *

Once Mother had taken Ino to kill a dog.

She had been just eight then – a wild child, with few teeth and fewer fears, with her mouth set in a perpetual expression that bordered on both a smile and a sneer. Not a hard and polished sneer, like the one Sakura's bully, Ami, ever so often wore, but an amused one, as if she knew much more than she let on.

Her hair was short back then, not as long as it was now, long past her shoulders, and straight, just like Mother's. She was a pretty child, prettier than her already established best friend Sakura. Years later, even the older Genin crooned "Dollface" at her, as she walked past and tried not to notice how pink-haired Sakura ducked her head self-consciously.

Mother took her to a farm just outside the village. She was dappled in a cloak of green, her hair stuck up at the back of her head, held together by a gleaming green clasp of emerald. Her eyes were hard and tight, and when she spoke, it was a little terse: "Follow me."

They went outside the village. Ino's cloak billowed behind her, softly rustling the richly green, knee-high grass, while Mother trudged ahead of her. Exultation lay like a glamour over her skin, and she turned around to give Ino a winning smile.

"My mother took me out here, as well, you know?" she said. "It was one of the few times she ever bothered with me."

A bird twittered above her head. Ino surveyed the foliage, which was a nutty brown, as the sunbeams penetrated through the cracks, turning the particles that drifted around her face golden.

"You're wondering why I took you with me," Mother stated, eyes glistering brilliantly, "I'll make you a better ninja. You want to be a good one, don't you?"

Ino nodded, and followed and urged her legs to go quicker as Mother sped up ahead of her. The farm was large, smelling of mud and manure, with moss covering the roof. A man with a slanted eyes was waiting by the entrance, and he bowed deeply when he spotted them, thanking them for coming.

"I couldn't bear to put that old thing down myself," he said, waving a hand at the stables to his right. His teeth were yellowed, and uneven, which made Ino dislike him. She liked pretty things, like the pink twilight lamp in her carpeted room, and the embroidered kimono Mother had gifted her for the Festival, decorated with swirling flowers. "But it needs to happen. Since Yuudai broke his hindleg, he's been in nothing but pain."

"We'll take care of it," Mother promised, giving the farmer a fleeting touch on his tanned hand. She turned towards the stables, but before she could move, the man spoke again.

"I can wait here with the child," he said, gesturing to Ino. She felt young under his deep blue gaze, but straightened her spine to show that she was tall. She was taller than Sakura, but not taller than stupid Ami, but she would get there. Dad promised she would be tall, after all. "I can show her the horses, if she wants."

Ino had seen the horses in Konoha, pounding their hooves on the uneven cobblestones, with the whites of their eyes fully visible, but she had never been close enough to touch. She liked the man much better already.

"No," Mother said, in her commanding tone, which made Ino squirm and the man blink. "She will come with me. She has to learn. That's why we're here."

Ino went with her to the stables. It were dark chambers, full of straw. She breathed in deeply through her nose and surveyed the wooden planking above her head, where the high ceiling blinked at her in the shallow light. Mother led her to a corner and crouched down on the floor by a large brown dog, which lifted its head to look at them.

Ino reached out to stroke its snout, but Mother swatted her hand away and put a kunai in her fingers. It was not the blunt ones that they used in spars and practices, but sharpened. The steel glinted up silver in the light.

"I want you to kill it," Mother said bluntly. She was not looking at Ino, but gazing far off, at the high ceiling above her.

"That's cruel," Ino said, lowering the kunai. "It's a dog, Mother. We can't just do that!"

"It's hurt. Put it out of its misery."

"No!" She dropped the kunai on the floor. It clattered against the grey stone.

"We won't leave until you kill it."

They sat there for hours. Ino sat with her arms crossed and legs tucked underneath her, looking anywhere but at the dog which lay obediently at their feet. She sniffed and cried and begged, but Mother repeated that they wouldn't leave, not until she performed the deed.

The sun rose higher against the sky, until it shone through the shallow window panes of the stables, and the farmer came in to check a few times, but Mother made him go with just her stare.

When the sky began to darken, Ino sniffled again.

"I'm hungry. Please," she begged Mother, who crossed her ankles and lowered her eyelids.

"Ino. Finish it."

"I hate you," she said, anger welling up inside of her, accumulating just under her sternum. Her heart was pounding against her ribcage and in her throat. "I really do."

Mother blinked at her and then heaved a sigh. It rattled slightly. "I despised my mother too, when she took me to kill an animal," she said. She raised a hand towards her brow and tugged on a few strands of her hair, snagging on a loose knot.

"It were kittens she wanted me to kill, Ino. Tiny, little things – didn't even have their eyes open yet. But my mother insisted on it. We stayed there for a day and a whole night. I even tried to run away, but she caught me and held me there."

"But why?" Ino's breath was hitching in her throat, and she glanced at the dog by her feet, whose eyes were closed and breathing even, chest going up and down in rythmic motions.

"To show me that the world is cruel. Sometimes we have to do cruel things. You think that killing an animal is hard, right? What about humans? Children, babies – if you become a ninja, you'll have to kill them if your Village demands it, Ino. You must."

Mother's eyes were shining in her face, and for a moment, Ino wondered if she would start crying. Her mouth was dry and she swallowed against the bad taste at the back of her throat, but it stayed, no matter how many times she roamed her tongue around.

"If you do not kill this dog, you'll never become a ninja," Mother continued, after heaving another rattling sigh. "You will die on the battlefield, or be executed and bring disgrace to Yamanaka name. This is your choice, Ino; if you kill this dog, you'll get a taste of what it's like. If you don't, I will pull you out of the Academy."

There was a moment of asphyxiating silence. Ino stared at her mother, but could not find any trace of the woman she encountered ever so often crouching between the buttercups and pansies in the garden, or the woman who had rolled over in laughter, when Ino came home, covered in mud and dirt from her spar with her friend, Chouji – there was nothing sweet and soft left in the woman in front of her, as if she was rendered to a blank doll.

"Do it, Ino," Mother said, voice soft and laced with something akin to pain, picking up the kunai from between the straw strands on the floor, her long sleeve swishing around her arm, and putting it between Ino's idle fingers. "This isn't a young, innocent kitten. This is an old dog, that's in nothing but pain. Do it."

Growling against the frustration in her chest, and blinking against the burning moisture in her eyes, Ino slashed the dog's throat.

* * *

During the days she walked, it rained.

She couldn't remember the last time it had stormed like this. The climate in Konoha and the regions surrounding the village was mild, with lots of wind, and good weather, and rare winter torrents that came once in a while. The constant drizzle turned the ground under her boots into a spongy moisture, and soaked her clothes, until the cold sept into her skin and had her shivering without abandon. It made her cranky. She became irritated at the slighest of sound; a droplet splashing on her forehead, the wind rustling the bushes. During the evenings she failed to make fire; the wood was so wet that it fell apart in her fingers. She wondered idly if she would ever feel warm and safe again.

She scavenged the woods in search of food. None of the insects were out, buzzing in the air, full of proteins. On a field trip when she was nine, one of the female teachers, Suzume-sensei, had shown her how to make lure insects with honey or marmelade, but it seemed like a lifetime ago, the memory bleak and fading, and the weather was far too wet.

Ino searched for dens and holes, but every one she found was vacant and full of water. She ate meager portions of mushrooms she found, obstructed from view by a pair of green, young bushes, the dwindling rations of bread, dango and riceballs, and gobbled up the red berries that she had plucked by the Konoha gate. She wasn't quite sure whether they were meant for human consumption, but it stilled the nauseouting hunger somewhat, which seemed to perpetually churn in her stomach, growling like a monster.

Her walking wasn't without problems, as well.

She had tried to walk up a tree and hop from branch to branch, like the shinobi did on the rooftops in Konoha, but it left her feeling weak and exhausted, and she fell more often than not. She now sported a long, shallow gash on her underarm, and red, irritated scratches on her calves. Her chakra control was imperfect, and now it showed, so she took to walking instead, but after a few days her shoes were soaked and cold, and her feet bleeding and in constant pain.

When the sky began to darken, Ino came upon a small creek. She swallowed against the metallic taste in her mouth and loosened the straps of her heart-shaped bag, sighing in relief as she collapsed on the ground. She took out one of the riceballs and munched on it.

A bird twittered above her head and flew down to land a few meters away from her, sitting on a patch of beard-moss. It was a tiny little thing, with grey feathers and beady, black eyes.

"I wish I had a horse," Ino said to it, around a mouth full of food. "If I had a horse, I would have been in Suna by now. I mean it."

She kicked off her boots and plopped herself up against the rind of a twisted oak, folding her legs neatly under her. The gnarled roots made sitting uncomfortable, but her feet didn't ache so much, so she stayed still and sat. The smell of her sweat was almost unbearable, and she tried not to think too hard about it, but it seemed impossible to escape and to manage.

"Mother never wanted me to have a pet, you know? I bet I could have convinced Dad, but once Mother sets her mind to something, she won't budge. We only had the stupid fish. But they're dead." All the golden, glittering fish, belly-up in ceramic tubes, eyes glassy and flat. The human bodies in the street had had glassy and flat eyes, unseeing. The rice ball suddenly ceased to taste nice.

"I won't let you die, if you come with me," Ino said. The bird inched closer, hopping towards her sock-covered feet, but stopped there, gazing up at her with beady black eyes. It was a much smaller animal than the ravens and crows, in Konoha , which had the same, deep-seeing eyes. Those had flown down to pick rotting, decomposing flesh and eat eyeballs.

Ino waved her hands and kicked at the bird, until it fluttered upwards with panicky slaps of wings.

"Yeah, go away," she told the vacant space by her feet. "Stupid bird. You won't get my eyes."

When darkness descended upon her, Ino made sure to pass the creek quickly, stepping into the water with a faint expression of disgust on her face. She made no light, but listened quietly to the rustling of the bushes in the evening wind, and the crunch of stone and dirt under the soles of her worn boots, and stepped accordingly.

She went in a straight line for hours, yawning and groaning softly, every time a vicious branch reached out and snapped at her ankles. She was almost at the edge of the woods, when she saw something glint in the pale moonlight. There was a cabin visible through the nutty brown and the vivid green foliage of the woods.

She entered it quickly, almost forgetting to breathe in excitement. Soup in cans, lines of reed spread across the floor, jackets hanging from a hook, disheveled bedsheets, cropped up in a corner, fresh cotton in a cupboard. There was mildew forming on the edges of the window panes, and rot in the wood of the shutters, but it was warm and dry, and it took all the strength she had left not to cry.

She plopped herself on the bed, shedding her boots and clothes as quickly as she could and was left shivering, as her sweat dried on her skin, even in the warmth of the cabin. She donned her hastily packed pajamas, curled up between the covers into a fetal position, and fingered the kunai that she placed under the pillow. The cabin smelled like flowers. Like home, said a voice in her mind, but she pushed that one away, since thinking about Konoha made her parents reappear in her mind, or Ayano, stuffed in a freezer. Or Sakura, who was perhaps roaming the streets as a dead thing, wandering with no purpose.

Ino slept for hours, despite the faces flashing against her eyelids and her wounds scabbing over, and the cabin was filled in golden sunbeams, when she awoke. The chain by the door dragged over the floor, an aggravating sound of metal against wood, a bird hooted outside.

Ino didn't dare make fire. The hearth was full of ash and dry twigs, but the smoke would perhaps draw people or dead things over, so she clothed herself in mutiple layers, lay in bed when she could, and broke into the soup cans.

She went out to find berries an hour later, hands spasming in their pockets against the sudden cold. She had brushed her hair, which had been reduced to a matted mass that lingered in her neck in only a few days time.

She dialed the wireless radio again, when she came back to the cabin, licking the red berry juice off her fingers. "Ino Yamanaka here," she told the static wearily, stifling a sigh. "Heiress of the Yamanaka clan. Student of the Academy. Please, _please_ , respond."

She tried again after that, speaking to the static, which seemed to go on unconditionally, with different wordings. "Sakura," she once tried, dabbing at the tears trailing down her cheeks, breathing jagged and laboured. "I didn't really love Uchiha Sasuke. I'm sorry we fought about that boy. I didn't mean it."

The plan was to leave after she recovered a little from the journey. Her joints ached with every movement, and the small rations had taken its toll. Ino felt as if she was drifting, floating just above the earth, as if gravity had shifted. She tried to dampen her lips by rolling around her saliva with tongue, but it felt even more blistered and cracked afterwards.

"What I wouldn't give, for a bit of chapstick," Ino said. Her voice echoed through the cabin, rebounced against the wooden walls to come back to her own ears. Staring down at her pale hands, she realized that she might be lonely.

* * *

The days took no order from that day on; Ino slept during some nights and was awake during others, staring out into the anonymity of the shadows that morphed into darting shapes if she gazed long enough. Bush clovers made canvasses of the inside of her eyelids; in her dreams, she saw them distorted and burning, while her mother laughed from her place by the carnations, and her father watched on, far crueler than she remembered him to be. Everything inside of her felt disjoined and disconnected.

She could not keep her feelings seperate from another; one moment, she was standing by the armchair, listening to the sound of the twisted oak trees, the muffled cawing of the birds, the dragging of the door chain over the wooden planking of the floor, feeling nothing but transfixed in a reverie of peace, and the next, her spine was buzzing, her limbs were folding in on each other, and her breathing sped up until the world swam in front of her eyes.

The day after, Ino crawled towards the mirror on the desk by the bed. She hadn't arranged the sheets, just left them there, coiled around the mattress, half-flowing onto the floor. The mirror was more a shard of glass, and she wondered where the rest of it was – whether the old owners had taken it with them when they had left. Yet the cabin hadn't looked as if it was scavenged or as if someone had left in a hurry, nor had there been any sign of a bloody struggle.

Her reflection made her gasp in surprise, her chest filling with air. A girl, while a little thinner than before, and with less make-up, stared back at her. Her reflection was uncompromising; it stared back at her, with the same eyes that had looked out of her face for the last eleven years, and her face was just as round and defined as before. She wasn't certain where she acquired the belief that she would look different now, as a killer, and a survivor, but she was just the same as before. On the outside, at the very least.

Ino ran through her usual katas in the morning. She tried to find routine in the movements, slowly raising her hand above her head, balling it into a fist, with her thumb pressed against the outside of her fingers. She breathed in and out through her nose, like Iruka-sensei had so often instructed her, and then slashed her hand down in one fluent movement. "When you kill, you do so quickly," Sensei had said.

She dressed quickly, trudging outside into the crisp air. The wind bit at her face and played with her ponytail. Resolutely, she went to the creek that changed into a full river further into the woods, and washed her face, wiping off the grime that had accumulated on her cheeks. With a sense of foreboding, she scanned the growth around her, even checking the interlacing branches of the trees, as if she could find a dead thing crouched between the leaves.

When nothing moved, Ino slowly turned to the deeper part of the river, where the ground wasn't visible through the water. She discarded her dress and left it under a bush and then plunged into the creek, drawing a sigh of delight when the water pooled around her. It had been days since her last shower; everything itched, as if her bones themselves were trying to get out of her dirty skin.

She lay on her back, drifting and floating, and stared at the dry, cerulean sky. Her hair waved around her, like a coracle on the waves, twisting to form a golden necklace. "Hell!" said a voice and Ino's eyes snapped wide-open. She could see a bearded man coming through the trees, not bothering to be quiet; branches snapped around him as he came storming towards the river.

Her blood stilled, and then she forced her damned limbs to move. As fast as she could, she shot underwater, grabbing at everything and nothing, scraping the skin of her palms open on the rocky bottom. A hand yanked at her hair and Ino's mouth filled with water as she tried to scream. With one hand, she dug her nails in the arm of her assaulter, and with the other, she desperately grabbed at the water, fingers stretching to find anything loose and sharp.

Had there been a kunai, Ino would have gashed his arm, and killed him, but there was nothing but endless water around, no sound or feeling but the water clashing against her bare skin and the fabric of her underclothing, and far above her, the man grunted and growled like an animal.

The man hoisted her up. The water became lighter and clearer above her head, and the next moment, Ino was gulping in large breaths of air. The man pushed her towards the bank, where he plopped himself down and threw a blanket at her, which he wrenched loose from his backpack's straps.

"Hell," he said again. "I thought you were drowning. You alright?"

For an assaulter, he looked remarkably good-natured. His brown eyes were wide, and his beard and hair dark and well-kept. There was no blood caked onto him and he seemed only mildly ruffled by their struggle in the water. The headband that was tied around his forehead glinted in the shallow rays of the morning sun.

"You're from Konoha," Ino breathed, scooting closer to him and pulling the blanket tighter around her body.

"And you're Inoichi's daughter," the man sighed. "I should have known with that golden mane of yours."

He extended a hand. "I'm Sarutobi Asuma."

* * *

A/N

I wasn't quite as happy with this chapter as I hoped to be. I feel that the meeting with Asuma is the only important thing in this chapter, other than the exploration of how Ino's feeling and adjusting to her life on her own and nothing that I put on paper came out as I wanted it to be. That said, I do hope that you enjoyed it at least a tiny bit. I apologize for the wait and wish you all happy holidays.


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